


The Case of the Two-Faced Professor

by musamihi



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Case Fic, M/M, Modern Retelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-02
Updated: 2013-04-02
Packaged: 2017-12-07 06:57:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/745614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are very few people for whom Sherlock would visit Cambridge, Massachusetts in March, of all times.  But when his assistance is requested by a professor at MIT with a very familiar phone number, he drops everything and jets off to the States.  A modernization of The Adventure of the Three Students.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Case of the Two-Faced Professor

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Modern Doyle Fest over on Livejournal. For logistical purposes, I've taken some liberties with the interior design of the MIT Physics Department. Thanks to Sherlock_Holmes for beta-reading! All remaining mistakes are my own.

Any view Sherlock might have enjoyed from the Longfellow Bridge was washed out to white by the spring snow blustering up the Charles, a frenzy of large, soft crystals that would undoubtedly be gone by morning. He hadn't decided to walk across the river into Cambridge for the scenic value, in any case; it simply pleased him to make a deliberate approach, to put himself in the place of a wave or particle making its precise and inevitable journey to the instrument that would measure its speed and force and nature and give it a name.

The man on the other end of his journey would, he knew, find the idea terribly flattering.

Turning into the long, tree-lined road that ran the north bank of the river, where the snow gathered cheerily, voluminously in early daffodils and whipped around pedestrians dressed in colours that spoke of undue seasonal optimism, Sherlock allowed himself to steep in the anticipation of intrusion. It wouldn't be an intrusion, really, as he'd been invited – but in some sense, in every room he entered he was a trespasser. He would come into Professor Soames' office, he would strip its every last little detail, and he would drop himself among them like a child surrounded by the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and wonder which held secrets and which had been fabricated especially for him.

Professor Soames' email had popped up late last night with the rest of the daily frass of unimportant, uninteresting platitudes and tips and requests, and had almost been deleted with the rest of it. But the phone number buried in the otherwise unremarkable signature file had been (most immediately noticeable) one digit too long for anything that ought to be coming out of the continent on which the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was situated, and also (most importantly) one he knew by heart from having carried it on a slip of paper in his jacket pocket for almost the past year. 

And so, on the strength of nothing more than a number, he had boarded a plane the next morning, crossed the Atlantic, and turned his collar up against Boston to meet Jim Moriarty's latest invention. A little more than two hours after landing, he walked at last into Killian Court and crossed to the Department of Physics, taking a perverse pleasure in leaving a long, straight, utterly unabashed line of footprints in the white-flecked grass.

The halls weren't busy; it was mid-afternoon. He counted door numbers around corners until he found the office of the appropriate assistant listed on the department's website, and rapped brusquely on the open door as he advanced toward her desk. "Sherlock Holmes," he said, sparing her a glance (young, perhaps just out of university; desperate for coffee judging by the turned-out contents of her pocketbook, receipts, ticket stubs, cards, picked clean of all coins; the author of those deeply frustrated doodles on the notepad beside her keyboard; on the second day of wearing that blouse; and glassy-eyed behind what was no doubt some mindless task on her computer) before sweeping his eyes over the walls, covered in posters from conferences, news clippings, lists and schedules done in tiny type and interrupted by lines of yellow highlighter, slatted mailboxes, magazines, a couple of greeting cards tacked up over the desk. "For Professor Soames."

She drew back a little in her chair, blinking at him over an overwatered pot of African violets. "I – sorry, you're here to see Professor Soames?"

"Yes." He pivoted impatiently on his heel, thought better of any of the sagging waiting chairs, and turned back to arch his eyebrows at her nameplate. _Amy Bannister, Administrative Assistant, Particle Physics – Theoretical._ "If you'd let him know."

Her hands floated above the keyboard, stiff with hesitation, and she glanced to the wall at her side before slipping into a rather unconvincing smile. "Sure – I can show you his office."

Sherlock followed her out into the hall, and nearly tripped over her when she stopped three feet later to knock quietly at the adjacent door. "Hilton? There's –"

"I'm in here today, Amy," came his voice from some distance behind them as the doorknob clicked under her hand – locked. "Sorry, I should have said."

Sherlock spun, his desire to appear steady and unperturbed overwhelmed in a moment by the need to be face to face with the mask he'd come more than three thousand miles to see. 

Jim leaned out into the hall a few doors down, gripping the doorframe, his narrow grey tie swinging like a broken pendulum to hang off the side of his chest. "I've been slammed all day," he said, his eyes still fixed on the assistant, his smile fluttering, almost shy, as he nudged the bright red frames of his glasses further up his nose. "I haven't seen you at all. You're feeling better, aren't you? You look so much better."

"Oh, thanks," Amy said, her shoulders hunching just a bit. "Much better, really." She pressed quickly onward: "This is Mr. –"

"Holmes, yes! I know – what, you mean to tell me you've never heard of him?" Jim laughed and advanced toward them as Amy's face became carefully blank with uncertainty. "Oh, I'm only teasing. Thank you, Amy. Don't worry," he added, grinning up at Sherlock as he slipped his arm around the crook of his elbow and drew him down the hall. "You'll get there someday."

Sherlock let himself be led to the open door, where his tentative smile flattened in disappointment. "This isn't your office." It was stale with the smell of hand sanitizer and cold coffee; there was a fake ficus wedged into a corner beside a shelf overflowing with drifts of papers long untouched and books turned every which way. The disarray was far too mundane, too lacking in any indication of self-consciousness to be any part of Jim, a man incapable of tying his shoe without deciding what he meant by it. This place belonged to a colleague, an academic of no mean talent but with a very narrow field of interest that allowed everything in the margins to slide – not like Jim, whose fascination, whose control, encompassed all.

"No – I locked mine up yesterday." Jim shut the door, dropped into chair behind the desk, and waved his hand at its opposite. "I didn't think you'd want me contaminating the crime scene."

"A _crime_ ," Sherlock said, settling comfortably into the chair and letting the word roll out in front of him like a thick carpet. "You don't say."

"It's just a silly little thing," Jim said with a shrug and a dip of his chin, as though he were excusing himself for an unworthy gift. "Nothing to merit dragging you all the way here, but it made me think of you." 

Pleased – much more pleased than he could ever have been with any sort of present – Sherlock relaxed back into the chair, settled his elbows at his sides, and drummed his fingers along the arms with a certain eager energy. He found himself flattered; not that Jim had thought of him, because it was inconceivable that they shouldn't both think of each other more or less constantly, but because it had resulted in the extension, the opening of this little piece of Jim's reality, a proffer of trust that was mixed, as always, with a measure of challenge. He could think of nothing else he would rather be doing, and even in this meaningless room the warmth of the assurance that here he would never be disappointed enveloped him like a perfect old coat. 

"Well," Sherlock said, steepling his fingers beneath his chin and cocking his head in a little flourish of gravity. "I think you had better start from the beginning."

Jim planted his hands on the desk and pushed off, spinning gently in his chair, his arms outstretched to indicate the unimpressive expanse of office around him. "My name," he said, "is Hilton Soames. I'm a visiting professor this year – it's a wonderful gig, you know – and aside from my research, one graduate seminar, and my wrangling of two or three graduate students, I have one undergraduate lecture on my plate. Some people turn their noses up at that sort of thing, but I enjoy it – don't look like that. I do. They're astounding creatures, and sometimes they come up with the most delightful stuff. Anyway, they're very appreciative – kids love big names, don't they, and when it comes to theoretical particle physics, _Hilton Soames_ …" He trailed off with an elaborately modest shrug.

Sherlock smiled fondly. "Don't worry – you'll get there someday."

Jim sniffed. "That's right – I forget, you never read. Well. Yesterday I went to the classroom a little early to set up for seminar, because of course genius is never any guarantee that you'll be able to get the projector to talk to your laptop. By the time I had the damned thing working it was already a couple of minutes into class time, and only then did I realize – I'd forgotten my notes. I –"

"Not on the laptop?"

Jim paused, bringing his toe down on the carpet to stop himself. "I beg your pardon?"

"You hand-write your notes." 

"Yes. That's irrelevant." But he said it slowly, as though to make absolutely sure, and Sherlock hadn't heard anything quite so gratifying in weeks.

"Probably," Sherlock conceded. "I just think it's sweet."

Jim made a face, and kicked off again. "I realized," he resumed, "that I'd forgotten my notes. This was a little after five thirty. As you might have noticed on your way in, that infinite corridor of ours isn't something one wants to walk up and down again with a room full of people waiting – so I texted Amy and had her fetch them out of my office and run them over. I was lucky she was still around, as generally she leaves a little after five. That _is_ relevant."

"I've come all the way from London; the least you could do is not give it all away at the start. You keep your office unlocked?"

"During the day, generally."

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Fantastic."

"So – Amy brought me my notes. Except she only really brought me half – as I'm sure you're ready to point out, one of the dangers of clinging to pen and paper is that parts of files can be misplaced, and in my irreproachable devotion to playing the absentminded professor, I had left the last ten pages on the other side of my desk. At that point, of course, I gave it all up for a joke, told the riffraff the entertain themselves, and went jogging back to my office myself for the rest. Would you like to guess what I found?"

"Oh, don't."

"I found the door wide open, my desk all ahoo, and Amy, shaking like a leaf, half-collapsed in the guest chair. I asked if she was all right, and she told me she'd come back from bringing me my notes to find my office had been rifled through. She was awfully upset. She's very good – punctual, serious, organized, the whole package, in no way ambitious enough to go pawing through other people's things. I told her it was all right, we'd sort it out, all that kind of thing, and that she should go home and try not to worry about it."

"Kind of you."

Jim let his head loll over the back of the chair. "I'm not really in the habit of worrying about people who try to steal from me. She said she felt sick, anyway, and when I asked her if she wanted anything she said she just needed to sit a minute; so I went back to my seminar – emailing you along the way – and came back afterward to find she'd locked everything up and gone home. Anyone in the department, really, would have known I was in class after five thirty, and would have expected Amy to be gone by five – it _should_ have been the perfect time to go sneaking around."

"So," Sherlock said, hoping to telegraph by his level gaze and complete disinclination to do anything but slouch back in his seat that he was decidedly unimpressed, "you left the person you found at the scene of the crime sitting in the _middle_ of the scene of the crime for, as far as you know, up to two hours –"

"Three hours."

"Up to _three_ hours, and on top of that you're accustomed to leaving said scene wide open to anyone who might want to wander in in your absence – and you don't think that constitutes contamination?"

"Do you always whine so much? Come on, Mr. Holmes." Jim stood, reaching into his trouser pocket for a set of keys, and beckoned Sherlock after him into the hall. "Let's get you some evidence."

"Such as it may be."

They crossed to Jim's dark, unadorned door. Sherlock stood behind, peering over Jim's shoulder as the door swung open; the office's west-facing windows with their crooked blinds caught the mild afternoon light of the overcast spring day, bathing the room in a warm and dissolute gray. Jim stepped aside to let him pass, and Sherlock, with a thrill that had been building in him since the engines had first roared to life on the tarmac at Heathrow early this morning, stepped inside.

The office was as tidy and as artful as its counterpart across the hall had been unkempt. The shelves, if anything, were under-burdened, their stretches of empty space drawing the eye to the few books and ornaments distributed throughout. The door to what appeared to be a slim closet was hung with a calendar featuring a scenic view of some section of the Alps. There was a fresh, earthy sort of smell, emanating most likely from the row of potted ferns clustered happily on the windowsills; the desk showed the gentle confusion of daily use, the monitor slightly askew, a white mug ( _Physicians Do It Relatively Well_ ) with a bright green tag dangling, limp, over the side. A bright purple stack of post-it notes was covered with a large, awkward handwriting that Sherlock longed to examine more closely. The room held a myriad of clues to something he knew he would find vastly more intriguing than an amateur burglary – and most surprising, perhaps, was just how freely it offered up its owner. This wasn't the office of a man who had anything to hide. Two diplomas – Trinity College, Caltech – were propped prominently on an upper shelf, spelling out the details of Hilton Soames' educational career for all to see. There were photographs, some framed, some stuck to the corkboard above the desk with pins, most of them clearly featuring Jim (in a progression of ever more ridiculous glasses) with colleagues, with students – altered, perhaps; but several appeared to have been taken on this very campus, and would seem to have been unlikely to pass muster with the rest of the department if blatantly faked. For a moment Sherlock wondered whether his name _wasn't_ Soames; whether Jim Moriarty wasn't the hobby of a bored physicist, a man steeped in too much entropy and too few answers.

"It's as I found it this morning," Jim said, leaning against the door jamb. His eyes hovered lazily somewhere around Sherlock's throat. "And as Amy left it, as far as I can tell. But you're the expert."

"Hm." Sherlock, with the reluctance of a child rolling out of bed for school, tore himself away from the real meat of the tableau and focused his attention on the actual case at hand. His expert opinion, he decided, was that Jim was likely correct. None of the incongruous bits of the scene – and there were several, alterations obviously not made in the regular course of the day – seemed to have been made with any real presence of mind. Whoever had swept through the office, they'd done it in a rush, either without bothering to cover their tracks or without time to do so at all.

"This," he began, stepping inside to rest his fingers gingerly on the edge of a desk drawer jutting out an inch or so above its counterparts. He slid it out further, examining the dishevelled contents. "Ajar, probably from the kickback when it was slammed, and in a hurry – and this set of keys have been thrust to the back – not where you generally keep them, I suppose? Most people don't. You use them every day, you grab them and drop them back on top of all this debris at a moment's notice. You would never push them all the way to the most inaccessible part of the drawer, not unless you were hoping to hide them."

As his mind sunk a little more readily into its usual posture, the position halfway between tension and ease that best accommodated observation, Jim and his reactions faded somewhat into the background; but Sherlock was conscious of him the way a swimmer is conscious of planning his next breath. He was present, essential, even when inaccessible. "And the keys," Sherlock continued, "not the ones that open your office, obviously – are for this file, among other things." Beside the desk there was a cabinet, the locking mechanism on one bureau protruding – unlocked, and not done up again. He bent to draw it out. The interior held no obvious answers, but three or four of the manila folders hanging within were turned the wrong way round; good places to start, if not precisely smoking guns. He removed them all, flipped quickly through them – and saw it. _Hah._ With a smirk, he held them out in a fan to Jim, like a magician offering up a deck of cards. "Pick one." He cleared his throat. "Allow me to suggest the one on your left."

With a quirk of his eyebrow, Jim pulled it from his hand and read the label. "Gilchrist, McLaren, and Ras." Apparently unimpressed, he flipped the folder open, thumbed through a few pages – and scoffed, his lips twisting into a not entirely uncompassionate sneer. "Oh, dear."

"Yes," Sherlock said, his shoulders squaring and throat tightening just slightly with pride, "as you can see, the corners –"

"He _never_ wrote this on his own, the poor idiot."

"The _corners_ ," Sherlock continued, a little pique passing into his voice, "of the top paper are pristine, whereas the other two –"

"Yes, corners, you're an absolute wizard," Jim murmured, nudging by him to set the offending file beside his keyboard. "You've been a great help, you'll have to let me buy you dinner." His hand stretched out to the back of his desk chair –

"Don’t." Sherlock grabbed his wrist and pulled; Jim spun to face him, stopped in his tracks with his hand raised between them, Sherlock's fingers pressing gently into his skin. There they stood for a beat, two, until the look in Jim's eyes passed from distraction to irritation (the irritation of being dragged away from something engaging, a sensation Sherlock knew so well he couldn’t help but _feel_ it with no more prompting than the tightness at the corners of Jim's mouth) and finally to full attention – an open concession, almost warm, almost submissive. A grant, an admission, a willing lending of ears. Sherlock tipped his head slightly to one side, and smiled. "I haven't finished."

Jim grinned up at him, pushing those boxy red frames up into his hair. "By all means."

"First, since you're so eager – tell me your theory." Sherlock leaned back against the desk, planting his hands behind him. "Without touching anything, thank you very much."

Jim went to shut the door, and leaned back against it, crossing his arms ostentatiously across his chest. "Two days ago, my undergraduates turned in their group projects – all of which now live in that file you so astutely identified as the object of the break-in. Now, the project was designed to ensure that no one could shirk and force his group mates to carry the entire load. There's a group portion and an individual one, all tied to a single score; without the full cooperation of every single group member, no one person can expect to emerge with a decent grade."

"You're a bastard."

"Yes. Anyhow, Gilchrist, McLaren and Ras are hardly evenly matched. McLaren's absolutely the weaker link, and his paper – as you've so kindly drawn to my attention – has been shoved into the file later than the others, and, furthermore, is certainly not his own work. My theory, then, is that he couldn't even get it together to cheat _on time_ ; that he turned in whatever rubbish he wrote himself on the deadline, subsequently copied or bought something decidedly less rubbish from someone else, and yesterday afternoon stole into my office to swap them out."

"But you've already pointed out the flaw in your little theory," Sherlock said, dealing out a pinched smile calculated to express more condescension than he rightly felt. He was unaccustomed to injecting this level of artifice into his explanations, but he was very conscious of having been brought here to perform, and wouldn't have disappointed for the world.

Jim slid his hand across his jaw, and when his mouth disappeared beneath his palm Sherlock found he was decidedly uneasy about what it might be getting up to. "Have I?"

"Why McLaren? You've been so fiendishly clever about giving them all precisely the same motive to commit the crime. Why jump on one before the others?"

"Because McLaren's a lazy, wretchedly entitled blockhead with more money than –"

"Animus. Oh, I thought better of you than _animus_. Observe." Sherlock stepped swiftly away from the chair, his coat flying out at his knees as he pointed from the seat of the chair toward the wall at which it was pointed. "The chair is shoved _back_ from the desk, and directed halfway between the door and the window – or, more precisely, I should think, between the door and that closet beside the window. Someone had to abandon his task quickly, jumped up from the desk, and walked – well, we're get there in a moment. None of this has been cleaned up or rearranged, which does speak in favour of Miss Bannister's integrity, but requires the question: why rush?"

"He heard Amy coming back down the hall after delivering my notes. He was caught out unexpectedly."

"Maybe." Sherlock passed over to the closet door. "But I don't think so. The way the chair's spun about – perhaps we can recreate the scene. Tell me about McLaren. Physically."

"Six foot three _without_ the cap he never bothers to take off when he's inside, and shoulders like a gorilla. Belongs on the other side of the river."

"Mm." Sparing a moment to let his eyes drift over him, from his narrow shoulders to his hips to his unaccountably shiny shoes, Sherlock pursed his lips. "Then you'll just have to take my word for it, won't you. When a man that size leaps up and makes off, the chair he's just been in will head the other way in spectacular fashion, won't it? This is your field we're in, broadly speaking. The angle of the chair ought to tell us the direction he went, if we know that he wouldn't have had much time to change his mind – which, judging by the scene, he didn't. Now, if I might point out, the only place that seems to present itself is this closet. I don't know that the angle of the chair and your massive blockhead quite add up, but let's see, shall we?" He opened the closet, cocking an eyebrow at the jumble of hanging coats and the two boxes of student papers stacked on the floor. Sherlock himself couldn't possibly fit inside without disturbing everything, and going by the accumulation of dust alone … "Not looking good for you, Jim."

"So he didn't hide in the closet."

"You propose that he heard Miss Bannister coming, and …?"

The implications of the long, straight, uninterrupted corridor that ran the spine of the building seemed finally to make themselves known. Jim's mouth twisted. "Hm."

" _Someone_ hid in the closet." Sherlock pointed to the boxes, one side of which had been wiped almost clean, and to the sleeve of a jacket caught up in an unnatural position. "Even without these indicia – anyone who heard Miss Bannister approaching would have had no choice but to hide within your office, or be found out. They stuffed themselves in the closet, Miss Bannister stumbled upon the scene, and in her distress collapsed – very curiously, I think you'll agree – in the guest chair, all the way on the opposite side of your desk, rather than in _your_ chair, which, as we can see even now, would have made a much more convenient landing place."

"She _knew_." Jim's face was practically glowing with the surprise of it. There was little Sherlock liked to see better than that light in him, the joy that there still _were_ surprises. "She was covering – wasn't she? Somehow."

"Sitting on something, I'd wager – mittens, perhaps, going by the weather. I couldn’t say. But she –"

"She _lied_ to me. Oh, this is excellent. Excellent."

"And which of your three students was she lying for? Who could have fit in this hole?"

"Oh, only Gilchrist. Neither of the other two – she'd be a tight fit, but she'd make it. _Gilchrist_." Hunching over his desk, Jim flipped the file open again, snapping past the pages of McLaren's tainted paper one by one looking for some clue Sherlock wouldn't bother trying to imagine.

But he was only willing to wait for so long. Sherlock held himself in check for a beat; two; three. Long enough that Jim's continued interest in some undergraduate physics project over _him_ was markedly vexing. "Do you really," he asked, perhaps too much contempt bubbling up behind his words, "spend your nights at home marking papers for a bunch of adolescents who don't even know who you are?"

"Oh, it's not so bad." Jim threw the file shut as though he'd only been waiting for his cue to do so. There was a hint of his shy smile curling up along his lips again. "I just throw them down a flight of stairs like everyone else."

"Then what's the _point_?" 

"Spend a few hours trying to justify failing the brilliant son of a bitch who just _happened_ to drift his way down to the landing, and then come ask me. What's more fun than making two plus two equal three? Have a little _creativity_ –"

"That's your wheelhouse, not mine."

"Yes, you only think backwards. I know. It explains your shoes. In any case –" Jim sucked his lip between his teeth and crossed the space between them in a few paces, thrusting his desk chair out of the way to spin slowly in a corner. He stopped hard up against Sherlock's side, warm; his hand hovered at the small of his back. "Continue, maestro."

Sherlock drew a black woollen coat out of the closet. "I have nothing more to say, except that I find it exceedingly unlikely that Gilchrist's hair should have found its way inside your clothes simply from hiding in your closet –"

Jim grabbed the coat in question and pushed it back into the cluster of winter wear with a sharply sheepish smile. "That's not Gilchrist – that's Cooke. She's fantastic, I mean it – you'd like her. I'm supervising her dissertation." His smirk extended ever so slightly. "Jealous?"

"Of course; I never had anyone with half a brain to supervise _me_."

With a gentle click, Jim shut the closet again. "So, you've fingered our culprit. A bit of an anticlimax –"

"If you'd given me something actually _interesting_ –"

"But nonetheless, not bad for an hour's work, is it?"

It wasn't – nothing more remarkable than anything he did of a normal hour, and yet, far more satisfying. Any glimpse into Jim's life was worth a wasted day, and this had been less wasted than much of the preceding week. "I'll let you decide when I've sent you the bill."

"I'll send it back unopened; you haven't cleared up Amy, yet. Gilchrist wanting to rescue her own grade is a nice little sketch, but not the whole picture. Why, _why_ ," he asked, his fingers gathering up the excess of wool at Sherlock's back and dragging down, "is my saint of an administrative assistant keeping secrets?"

"The only truly interesting question." Sherlock could conceive of no reason to want to be in this sort of stifling, miserably regimented job at all, unless it were to investigate just such interpersonal vendettas, to watch rivalries unfurl and calculate their consequences. Even so, it was a longer term project than he would ever have invested himself in, and he thought it unlikely he could have lasted as long as Jim with only the dry, academic substance of study to sustain him in the face of his undoubtedly tedious and incompetent student body. Making two plus two equal three seemed more likely to leave him in a frustration of _angst_ than to exhilarate.

"It does interest me," Jim said, releasing his coat and walking away to set his desk to rights just as abruptly as he'd come. There was a certain heaviness to his features that made Sherlock doubt him; set about these mundane organizational chores, some part of him seemed to flee from his body and leave his face, shading his eyes in tedium (or retreat?) until they seemed only darkened and empty. And Sherlock found himself wondering why anyone – why anyone like Jim – would keep at something that brought him such moments of numbness, that separated the mind from the body with such stark divisions between the intellectual abstract and the insipid concrete. Why, when he had a life of breathtaking genius all of his own creation, would he throw himself into a world that forced such rapid, alternating dissociation from the mind, from Moriarty?

Unless that was the point, of course.

"It does," Jim repeated, no more convincingly, "interest me." He straightened. "Or, shall we say – it would." He hauled himself up onto his desk, legs dangling, the cuffs of his trousers drawing up to reveal a pair of bottle-green socks. His heels swung back and forth and clacked against the face of his computer tower with the sound of nuts falling on a tin roof. "But at the moment I think I've had enough of playing down in the sandbox, and I wonder if I wouldn't rather just –"

"Clean up?" Sherlock cut in, moving a little too quickly to stand between his legs, to curl his hands with a conciliatory pressure around the crooks of his knees. "Leave the children to themselves for a bit?" As intriguing as he found the last missing piece of the puzzle, he would leave it behind in an instant to keep what was infinitely more valuable. A little human drama would always present itself, like the hidden but ever-present frenzy always to be found upon kicking apart an anthill. Jim slipped away and turned up across oceans and was to be kept for as long as possible until, inevitably, he slipped away again. "So take me to dinner."

+++

The walk up Massachusetts Avenue was wet with slush and mud. The snow had stopped; its remnants were quickly disappearing under the humid, darkening weight of the fickle spring evening. The streets were less crowded than they might normally have been, the last of the spitting rain and the irredeemably grey skies enough to convince most of the city's weather-jaded population to stay home – but inside the concrete, flat-fronted place Jim recommended in inverse proportion to his opinion of its exterior decor, there was a healthy crowd, a full complement of young men and women gathered at the bar and the high tables that lined the walls. They all presented their little stories, but for now they were cast into the background. It was hard to absorb anything when he was so thoroughly devoted to soaking up one too many cocktails with Jim Moriarty.

Sherlock hardly felt he could do himself justice on such substandard fare as student cheating scandals, after all. He would have to prove before the night was out, and he looked forward to every scrambling moment of it. 

He took comfort in the fact that Jim knew it just as keenly, just as desperately as he did. The common goal they shared occupied a space so different from simple _mystery_ or _plot_ or _answer_ that dwelling in the signs and structures of the positively physical could become – draining. When men could reach out to one another with nothing more than an electrical impulse rendered unnecessarily into unadorned text, and that contact was enough to beckon one to the other over miles of frigid air and salted ocean and physical terrain scorned by frictionless travel – when they had discovered that the only thing that lay between them was the flimsy fabric of the _real world_ , there were things more important than games, than conceits, than challenges and offers.

But an offer he found, as soon as he stepped up to the bar – a goodwill gift he recognized immediately as Jim's concession to Sherlock Holmes' penchant for amusing himself with the trifling. Amy Bannister huddled with another young woman a few seats down, caught up in a halting and perhaps surly conversation, close and grim and determined. All Sherlock had to do was look; all he would have had to do would be to step a little closer, to investigate, perhaps to ask an unsettling question, and all would no doubt becomes clear. Gilchrist and her reluctant accomplice and their tangled affair would come apart in his mind like something softly saturated in water.

"You shouldn't have," Sherlock murmured, his eyes fixed on the pair even as he inclined his face slightly to Jim, his cheek brushing for a moment against his hair. 

"You _did_ come all the way here." Jim nudged at him with his hip. "Go on. I'll save you a seat." He pulled out a barstool, seated himself, slid a cocktail menu forward with an arch of his finger.

After a hesitation that lasted perhaps the space of a breath, Sherlock joined him. 

Jim regarded him curiously – not without some pleasure – over the rims of his glasses. "What – you wanted me to put a ribbon round them, too? Signed, sealed, delivered's not enough?"

Sherlock slid his chair in, his knee jostling against Jim's. "I find I'm satisfied."

"Oh, don't talk that way. I can't bear it."

"I mean it. Unless, in the interest of justice, you'd like me to get to the bottom of it for you."

"Justice," Jim said, eyeing someone else's French 75 with what could only be described as lust, "can go hang. If preserving one's reputation means trespass and a little light forgery, I'm not the man to slap anyone on the wrist for it. If she's not willing to let some idiot drag her down, I'm not going to fault her for it."

"So," Sherlock sighed, not unhappily, watching as the bartender drifted by and floated off again with Jim's order of a bottle of champagne. "You called me three thousand miles away for something that wasn't particularly bothering you. The moment someone snuck her hand into your desk drawer, you thought – I'll call Sherlock Holmes. Not because it's a matter of life or death, not because it will be at all difficult to solve, but because …"

Jim stole a napkin from the supply beside the garnishes and deposited it beside Sherlock's elbow. "Just because."

A reason, Sherlock decided, he could hardly find unsatisfactory. Being allowed – no, never mind allowed, being pulled bodily into a corner of Jim's world he had never seen, had never even suspected, was a privilege for which he would always have thought to pay with the services he was qualified to offer. His methods, his results, even, on occasion, his character had been the things people underlined when they told him why he was brilliant, or valuable, or good, but what good was any of it? Better by far to discover someone (not _someone_ , never just someone) captivated with the simple, complete, undifferentiated and undivided _him_ , and to realize that there was no need to pull himself apart into attractive and unattractive aspects. He was not a column of pros and a column of cons. He was Sherlock Holmes, one and entire, and a man whom he revered, emulated, adored, _was_ , had called him across an obstacle that once humanity had considered insurmountable, and he had answered. 

As the hours turned on through the night he revelled in the ease of it, in Jim's voice slurring ever so slightly under the weight of the drink; it made Sherlock want to press him down into the ground and lay him open, to hear how his words would lie along the contours of his body if he were left without the artificial support of spine, of manners, of posture. And there was nothing he required beyond this, beyond sitting beside him, sharing his presence, losing himself in every gesture, voluntary and involuntary, through which Jim Moriarty revealed himself – and taking the greatest pleasure possible in planning precisely how he would reveal himself to him, how they would spend the rest of the night showing one another just how easily they could bridge the doomed distance between them.


End file.
